I met Nancy Prater from Ball State University recently. I'm finding that her role in the relaunch of the BSU site is eerily like mine for the W&M site. At first, I thought the extent of the comparison was that, like me, Nancy benefited from the experts at mStoner. Now I know from reading an interview Nancy did with Journalism Hope that we think alike too.
My favorite part of Nancy's interview about the BSU relaunch is that when K. Paul Mallasch asked, "I like that you call it a re-launch rather than a re-design. Can you explain the difference between the two for our readers?" Nancy replied:
Sure. I think this is an important distinction, too. The big difference is that a redesign implies a simple face lift of how the site looks. However, ours was more than just a face lift - it really was an "extreme makeover." The site now has a fully-planned information architecture, which is just a fancy word for site outline or plan. This may seem like a minor thing, but Ball State's Web site was like a lot of Web sites of large universities - it grew organically over the years, with no real plan for growth. That has all changed.
Preach it, sister. This is precisely why we decided to call ours re.web.
posted by Susan Evans
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